StratumWhat's New in Stratum 1.2
An update focused on making Stratum easier to learn and its charts easier to hand off: a guided tour the first time you open it, on-screen Hints that explain any control in place, panel-by-panel zoom on control charts, pixel-exact export for slides and 4K video, and a fix for how bars below zero are labelled.
Stratum 1.2 is here. If Stratum is already installed, Stratum ▸ Check for Updates… will offer it; new users get it in the current download. Here's the tour.
A guided tour when you first open Stratum
Open Stratum for the first time and you now choose how to begin — explore the full app on a built-in sample dataset, with no email and no time limit, or start a free trial with your own files. Either way, a self-paced walk-through takes over the canvas and introduces Stratum on real data: run your first analysis in one click, build a chart, and learn your way around the workspace, one short step at a time. It steps aside the moment you start clicking, and you can reopen it any time from Help ▸ Guided Tour.
On-screen Hints — learn any chart without leaving it
A new Hints button in the toolbar drops a numbered badge onto every control, so you can see at a glance what each picker, toggle, and option does — tailored to the chart in front of you, not a generic tooltip. Badges land on the chart itself too: a "how to read this" explainer for the chart type, plus the plot actions it supports — drag to zoom, drop an annotation, open the zoom loupe, and click a point to reveal its row in the data. Tap any badge for a short, plain-language callout. Hints cover every chart and report, work the same on Mac and Windows, and are fully translated into all nine languages.
Zoom into a single control-chart panel
Control charts stack several panels over a shared sample axis, and you can now drag a box in any one of them to zoom that panel's value axis on its own — the sample axis stays in step across panels, so the points line up as you drill in. A zoom loupe magnifies the region under the cursor for fine reading, and a double-click or Esc snaps back to the full view. New to control charts? Our how-to and the What is a control chart? explainer cover the basics.
Export charts at the exact aspect ratio you need
Charts now export at the shape you actually need. A new aspect preset — 16:9 (video / slides), 4:3, Square, or Document — sizes a copied, dragged-out, or exported chart bitmap. Pick 16:9 and the 1× / 2× / 3× scale ladder lands pixel-exact on 1280×720 (720p), 2560×1440 (1440p), and 3840×2160 (4K UHD), so a chart drops into a slide deck or a 4K video with no letterboxing. The Export sheet shows the resolved pixel size as you choose, and reports keep their document page. Set the default in Preferences ▸ Charts ▸ Export.
Cleaner labels for bars below zero
On Trend and Bar charts, the value label on a bar running below the zero baseline used to be centred on the bar's end — sliced in half by the plot floor on a Trend chart, and overlapping the axis on a Bar chart. The label now sits fully past the bar end, mirroring the label above a positive bar, and the value axis reserves room for it and tick-labels below the deepest bar. Horizontal bar charts get the same treatment at their left edge.
.stratum document, and nothing leaves your machine.
How to get it
Existing users: choose Stratum ▸ Check for Updates… and the in-app updater takes it from there. New to Stratum? The download is already on 1.2, and the free 25-lesson tutorial is the fastest way in. Everything here is in every copy — Mac and Windows alike.